MENLO PARK, Calif. and HELSINKI, Finland – March 21, 2017 – MariaDB® Corporation, the company behind the fastest growing open source database, will host its inaugural user conference, M|17, on April 11-12, 2017 at the Conrad Hotel in New York City. Designed to support the increasing usage of MariaDB products in the enterprise, the two-day event features more than 30 sessions led by customers, community contributors and MariaDB engineers. Speakers will share how companies are breaking free from legacy, proprietary databases and adopting MariaDB as their corporate, open source database standard.

MariaDB Corporation executives Michael Howard, CEO, Michael “Monty” Widenius, CTO, and Roger Bodamer, Chief Product Officer, will deliver keynotes that discuss the open source mandate, how chips and databases are changing everything, a look at the evolving database landscape and the rise of mission-critical, transactional microservices, as well as a Q&A opportunity with the creator of MySQL and MariaDB.

Joan Tay Kim Choo, Executive Director of Technology and Operations at DBS Bank, and a passionate advocate for women in technology, will keynote on how the multinational banking and financial services corporation is replacing proprietary systems with MariaDB as their database standard.

Presentations from numerous customers and partners including Alibaba, DBS Bank, Facebook, Huatai Securities, Telefónica, Intel and more. Sessions will detail specific use cases such as using MariaDB as the database for private DBaaS offerings, best practices for migrating applications from Oracle Enterprise to MariaDB, what’s coming in MyRocks, a beta storage engine for MariaDB, and more.

“The velocity of change in today’s world, regarding new opportunities, as well as new threats, can only be handled by technology that is a reflection of our times. The proprietary technology of the past is simply not able to support today’s needs,” said Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB Corporation. “There is an acceleration in the world’s move away from the vendor lock-in, legacy design and high cost associated with proprietary databases. M|17 will provide a place where IT leaders and practitioners can hear from their peers and technology providers on how to adopt and implement an open source mandate.”

For the first time ever, DBAs can get certified on MariaDB. Attendees of M|17 will get exclusive access and be the first to take the brand-new MariaDB Certification exam. Successful completion of the 90-minute MariaDB Certification test proves the ability to perform core MariaDB database administration (DBA) skills, such as basic configuration, security, users and role administration, schema operations, performance tuning and backup and restore operations.

MariaDB Corporation is the company behind MariaDB, the fastest growing Open Source database. Started by the founders of MySQL, MariaDB Corporation is reinventing the database to support today’s enterprise needs. The company also builds complementary products, including MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB ColumnStore, that are valuable for deploying MariaDB in large, mission-critical production environments.

MariaDB Corporation provides world-class support and training for its products. The company is an active sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem.